Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Molecular self-assembly is an elegant and powerful approach to patterning matter on the atomic scale. Recent years have seen advances in the development of self-assembling biomaterials, particularly those composed of nucleic acids. DNA has been used to create, for example, nanoscale shapes and patterns, molecular containers, and three-dimensional macroscopic crystals. Methods for designing self-assembling proteins have progressed more slowly, yet the functional and physical properties of proteins make them attractive as building blocks for the development of advanced functional materials.
In any self-assembling structure, interactions between the subunits are required to drive assembly. Previous approaches to designing self-assembling proteins have satisfied this requirement in various ways, including the use of relatively simple and well-understood coiled-coil and helical bundle interactions, engineered disulfide bonds, chemical cross-links, metal-mediated interactions, templating by non-biological materials in conjunction with computational protein interface design, or genetic fusion of multiple protein domains or fragments which naturally self-associate.
In some scenarios, computational modeling and design of molecules can aid researchers in investigating the molecules. For example, computational protein design can provide valuable reagents for biomedical and biochemical research, identify sequences compatible with a given protein backbone, and design protein folds.